A while ago, following the fatal collapse of some ceiling panels in the Big Dig tunnels, Commonwealth magazine published interviews with local pundits about what went wrong with the management and public relations aspects of the gargantuan, 30-year project.  Some of the issues they raise include the need for:

• A strong leader and management team within the appropriate state agency with sufficient independence, power and talent to manage the contractor as well as keep the project from becoming a patronage dumping ground.
• Regular and honest outreach to keep the public informed and supportive as the project, and its budget, evolve.
• An exit strategy with the contractor if the work doesn’t meet expectations and a “succession” plan in place for others to finish the job if needed.

But there is another perspective that is equally important – at least to those of us who have spent our lives working for progressive social change.  From that perspective, the key issue is not project management or contract oversight.  The issue is how to maximize the project’s positive contribution to the livability and viability of our communities, the quality of our air and water, the sustainability of our resource use patterns, and the equitable distribution of the project’s costs and benefits.

Continue Reading »

“Home is the place where, when you have to go there,

They have to take you in.”   “I should have called it

Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”

Death of the Hired Man, Robert Frost

The two most important things about relatives, my mother used to say, are that you don’t get to choose them and that they take care of each other.  Back in the day, when most families were extended, you had no choice about going to grandma’s for Sunday dinner and you simply accepted that Uncle Al was loud, that Aunt Sarah was obnoxious, that Cousin Bob told bad jokes, and that each of the other people in the room were just who they were.  There was no option – family was your world:  for some of us, a significant part of our social life was the regular meeting of our “cousins’ club.”  At family gatherings, you learned not only that everyone was different but that it was possible to tolerate those differences and still share a meal – one of the fundamental understandings that underpin both families and democracy.

Today, despite some trends to the contrary and some lucky anomalies, most of our families are smaller and more scattered.  Many of us have compensated by creating alternative families of close friends, often forming when everyone in the group is first having children.  And those children, as they grow up, are now using email and social networks to maintain those connections, staying close to childhood and college friends.  But these extended friendship circles are composed of people we’ve chosen to be with.  Wonderful as they are, they do not force us to accept the validity of random differences.

So where do we learn to accept the uncomfortable other – which is what people from different social networks or groups often feel like – as a legitimate part of our daily lives?  Where and how do we learn that we’re all in this together?

Schools, mass culture, and the workplace provide some social mixing.  But the space were we interact with the widest variety of others, the place most essential to fostering democratic respect in those interactions, is the public built environment  – the places where we walk, drive, shop, play, and hang out.  But space is not merely a physical phenomenon.  Government programs and policies are also a kind of space within which we function and interact with others.  In fact, the public sector is the most important space we have because it shapes both the built environment and the social context that shapes our lives.

There is a complete circle aspect of all this – acceptance of others is one of the bedrock cultural requirements for democracy; democracy is one of the drivers of good government; good government programs shape the spaces that influence our daily life and the cultural attitudes that emerge from it, including the acceptance of others.

Continue Reading »

After years of effort, instead of holes in the sidewalk and pavement through which you could see the river below, the BU Bridge now has solid surfaces and (drum roll….) bike lanes!  It is a major victory for the Better Bridges campaign.

True: the bridge isn’t any wider than it was before, so the sidewalk is still too narrow.  There still isn’t a way to get from the Boston-side steps, over Storrow Drive, to the Charles River embankment.  On the Cambridge side, there still isn’t a way to safely walk under the bridge along the river bank rather than having to add to the confusion of the crazy Memorial Drive traffic circle.  The sudden incline on the curving entrance to the bridge from the stop-line on the Cambridge side is still dangerous for cyclists; and it would have been better if there were flexible bollards on the span separating the car and bike lanes.  Traffic congestion on the bridge isn’t significantly lower than before, but it’s clearly no worse despite there being only three car lanes instead of four – there is now one lane entering the bridge from either side, two lanes exiting on the other end.  (Advocates have been saying, for years, that the problem is in the intersections leading to the bridge, not the bridge itself – turns out we were right.)

But in many ways the area is both safer and more welcoming to a broader range of users than ever before – walkers, cyclists, people in wheelchairs, as well as those driving cars.  The extra right-turn lane off the bridge on to MIT-bound Memorial Drive is gone, no longer allowing cars to speed through a hidden crosswalk even when pedestrians thought it was safe to step out.  The lighting works, illuminating both the span and the river for the benefit of night-time rowers.  The view remains totally magnificent.  And the !bike lanes!  Amazing!! What an improvement!!!

Winning Campaigns

This victory didn’t happen by accident, or simply through the generosity of government officials.  Advocates fought long and hard to gain this “Better Bridge.”  How did it happen?  How did we win?  There are some key lessons from this phase of the multi-year “Better Bridges” campaign, both about how to fight and what we are fighting against.

As with most of life, successful advocacy requires balancing.  Advocates need to be involved with both movement building and organizational development.  They need to both mobilize public anger and channel it into support for negotiated partial-victory compromises.  The more urgent the issue they’re dealing with the more they need to demand immediate action while understanding how long it takes to push through significant reforms when the situation hasn’t yet reached crisis levels.  They need to work within coalitions while finding ways to build their own group.  They need enough technical expertise to critique official plans while developing trusting relationships with people inside the same agencies they are agitating against.

The following divides key BU Bridge Campaign lessons into three overlapping areas.  The first two discuss Advocacy strategy and the third examines the engineering assumptions that still underlie most transportation planning.

Continue Reading »

It’s both a cliché and a powerful insight to remember that the solution you come up with depends on which problem you are trying to solve.  A road builder sees problems in terms of the need for movement – usually meaning car capacity – and comes up the road expansion solutions.  A transportation planner – as well as a livable communities developer – sees problems in terms of using the built environment as a way to improve peoples’ quality of life and comes up with solutions that stress human interaction.

The elevated section of the McGrath/O’Brien Highway from the Cambridge border to Somerville’s Highland Avenue is old and deteriorating.  Working with people from the more than 20 land development and road planning efforts already happening along the corridor,   LivableStreets Alliance coordinated discussions that endorsed five core value/vision statements for what should happen in this area:

• Reunite neighborhoods cut apart by the highway.
• Humanize the space by lowering traffic speeds, reducing noise and pollution, narrowing lane width, and reducing the current six (or more) lanes to four.
• Make traveling across and along the corridor safer and more inviting for pedestrians, bicyclists, and bus riders.
• Add more trees, grass, storm-water drainage, and other green features.
• Encourage local retail and job-creating businesses; including crafts-based and green-economy enterprises.

To its credit, MassDOT (through its consultants) is also involving the community in a detailed analysis to decide what to do.  Called “Grounding McGrath,” the study is trying to ground future plans in both facts and desires and potentially represents another sign of “the new MassDOT” evolution from a one-dimensional focus on increasing car capacity to an understanding – and practice – based on the interaction of transportation systems with community wellbeing.

Or not.

At the same time that it’s conducting the Grounding McGrath study, MassDOT is also about to spend $14 million hiring a contractor to “repair” the overpass segment of the McGrath/O’Brien highway – a repair intended to keep the current road functional for another 10 to 20 years.   This significantly undercuts the value of the community-involving study process (and insults the citizens who are donating their time to work on it) by making it impossible to implement the study results using the currently-available Accelerated Bridge Program funding.  And if the repairs are actually just as “temporary” as MassDOT says, it is a waste of precious money that could be used to push the study forward and begin making some of the transformational improvements to the corridor’s roads that just about everyone agrees will be needed no matter what future alternatives are selected.  Worst of all, given the current  fiscal realities, it’s not clear if “kicking the problem down the road” will dump it into a period when there is insufficient money to do anything – and then we’ll really have to start dealing with falling concrete, if not falling cars.

Continue Reading »

This post was meant to be about three of the old highways now falling down and the increasingly bitter policy disagreements within nearby communities over what to do about it.  But as I thought more about these debates, it became clear that a significant secondary theme is that so few people trust the traffic engineers or their organizations – starting with total lack of belief in the validity of the traffic prediction models being used by MassDOT.  The models feel like such opaque black boxes of unknown facts and hidden formulas that they simply feel like fantasy projections of agency desires – and there is little trust of those desires either.  Applauding the projections that support one’s position and denouncing the rest is neither useful, logical, nor fair. The problem is that without analysis it’s all guesswork and power plays, which is not likely to end up creating optimal outcomes either.

The distrust is so deep that people are throwing the baby out with the bathwater – refusing to accept that the models’ results have any usefulness, even in situations where they actually can help compare alternatives.  The three projects each involve analysis of comparisons, and in comparison situations it doesn’t matter if the numbers are wildly inaccurate – each alternative will be distorted in the same manner giving some legitimacy to the analysis of the differences, if any, between the options. Maybe it is a local result of public disgust at the Big Dig.  Maybe it’s that American culture is simply anti-government, a tendency the Tea Party car worshipers have successfully tapped. Maybe it’s that we’re in the middle of several levels of global transition from the automobile age into something else, and Transportation Departments around the world still represent so much of the archaic and destructive past practices.  Whatever…. The sad result is that MassDOT’s efforts to open up the public process all the way back to the conceptual stage – at least in locations where advocates are active and vocal – have degenerated into shouting matches between the already-convinced partisans.

The danger is that we become so divided that we seem to have lost our collective ability to push past those with a stake in maintaining the car-centric past; that we end up spending hundreds of millions of dollars – and ultimately billions of dollars – recreating the roads that we already know will not carry us into a better future.  Former Secretary of Transportation Jeff Mullan once said that in addition to creating one agency out of the five that were pushed together as part of transportation reform, one of MassDOT’s key challenges is regaining the trust of the public.  The merger has happened.  MassDOT has shown a new openness and ability to be innovative in both construction and operations, saving money while improving performance.  There is, of course, more to do – perhaps finding ways to open the black box of prediction and decision-making should be next.

Continue Reading »

Q: Why do people live in cities?      

A: Because that’s where all the other people are.

 It’s really wonderful that Mayor Menino has a special group of “urban mechanics” finding ways to put new information technologies to work for the city.  Technology is very cool.  And fun.  And useful.  And has a huge impact.  I spent part of my life in high tech and even wrote a book ‘way back in 1996 called Civilizing Cyberspace:  Policy, Power, and the Information Superhighway about how the emerging digital networks could be used to enhance or stifle democracy

But when it comes to the most important qualities of urban life, the future is behind us.  I don’t mean that we should return to the disease-ridden, economically brutal cities of the past.  Despite the Tea Party’s desire to dismantle our public safety nets and return to the competitive jungle of the pre-Progressive era, our world is much better because of the intervention of governments to provide clean water, require sewer systems, and to reduce the massacre of human wellbeing caused by unregulated markets.  But there are important aspects of past urban life that are worth preserving or recreating that emerge from the presence of both cohesive neighborhoods and unstructured diversity.

The basic fact is that we’re social beings.  We like being with each other; we need to be with each other – people kept in isolation go insane.  Although many people are eager to escape the social confines of small town stagnation, once in the city they seek community and alternative forms of extended family through friendship networks, church membership, or workplace social connections.

At the same time, because they are full of people from many different backgrounds, cities are where the action is…the new ideas, the jobs, economic opportunities, the chance to try new things and even re-invent yourself.  Cities are the engines of civilization, prosperity, and innovation.  Cities are where we bump into new people, people different from ourselves, and have our world’s expand; where new ideas emerge from the clash of differing opinions and facts; where capital and markets meet in the search for ways to profit from new needs.  Cities thrive on social friction – the sparks that emerge from the density of our interactions as we scrape against each other (a process hopefully softened by access to parks and other greenery).

Despite nearly a century of assumption that cities were dying and the more prosperous future lay in suburban growth, despite the horrendous urban destruction caused by the effort to make our landscape serve the needs of moving cars rather than socializing people, despite all the techno-stupid predictions that the Internet would make cities obsolete, urban populations continue to grow.  Cities are still where it’s at, in transportation as well as other fields.

And the cutting edge of urban innovation recaptures those qualities that make cities the center of civilization, the launching place for both personal growth and commercial profit.  Farmers’ markets that reconnect local agriculture with urban shoppers and that get expanded into kid-centered “play streets.” The spread of pedestrian malls and “shared space” with lots of benches to sit on and small shops that revitalize downtowns.  Bike sharing programs along with Community Greenways and bicycle boulevards that extend the tree canopy and parks deeper into neighborhoods, creating safe places for family recreation and everyday commuting.  Reforming parking space requirements.  Think of how the once-empty Kennedy Greenway began to fill with people when the emphasis changed from building edifices to food trucks, carousels, concerts, and play areas.  (Now, we need to get the city to make space for separated bike paths as well!)

Cities are the source of innovation partly because today’s problems are so multi-dimensional.  The location and type of housing and commercial development, shaped by zoning and building codes, impacts the ability of residents to access healthy foods and have daily opportunities to be physically active, which impacts their willingness to spend money in local stores as well as their family’s health and medical bills, as well as….  There is a complicated but incredibly powerful converging of issues – transportation, community development, education, environmental protection, public health, business promotion – and cities are both small enough to allow the cross-departmental interaction essential to addressing situations and large enough to have enough resources to begin doing something about it.

Cities (and states) are especially important these days because of the immobility of the federal government.  The rise of the radical right has ended the past century’s trend of moving innovation upward to centralized national authorities whose distance from local elites allowed for greater flexibility.  (Creating nationwide reforms also prevented business from playing states and cities against each other in a “race to the bottom” that Conservatives now seem to see as essential for competitive freedom.)  Today, once again left on their own, cities and states have once again turned into the laboratories of democracy, although within the increasingly tight limits allowed by the collapse of federal support.

It’s time to make lemon-aide from the sour fruit falling off the federal table.  It’s time to push forward — creatively, boldly, radically – at the local level.

Continue Reading »

In the two weeks since I posted Part I, discussing the role of mass movement in creating the political space for issue-oriented advocacy, some of the Occupy Wall Street groups have begun digging in for the long haul by setting up systems and expelling troublemakers (something the New Left should have done before the FBI infiltrators led the way into violence).  At the same time, right wing commentators have begun trying to paint them as hooligans, if not agents of the devil.  (As usual, Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby places himself at the bottom of the pig pen by asserting both – see “A Sinful ‘Occupation’” from 11/2/11.)

But no matter what happens to the Occupiers – whether they dribble out over the winter or explode into civil disobedience demonstrations – they have opened the door for more.  It may be less open-ended or idealistic, but the next phase will be translating the Occupy vision into a series of specific demands, then turning those into systemic reforms at both the policy and operational levels.  And accomplishing that will require sustained, organized effort – meaning strong, sophisticated organizations.

Advocacy requires developing the political will for government (or other key groups) to act in the desired manner, helping public agencies acquire the technical capacity to plan and implement the action, and then mobilizing public support behind the vision and program.  This doesn’t happen just because it ought to.  It takes slow, careful, exhausting work.

So this installment, Part II, describes the other two prime directives of social change – creating sustainable organizations and winning long-lasting, institutional reforms.

Continue Reading »

(This was written in response to a challenge from MassDOT’s new chief, Transportation Secretary Richard Davey.  But it’s really about what all service, public sector, and non-profit organizations need to keep in mind when they begin a goal-setting process – and the types of goals that outside stakeholders and advocates should be insisting upon.)

A Sales VP in a high-tech firm I once worked at told his staff that “effort only counts in elementary school.  In the adult world, all that matters is results.”  Of course, the real issue is the nature of the results you are seeking in life, which I would maintain should include more than dollar-denominated bottom lines.  But the core idea, the value of numerically describing what you are trying to achieve, has a lot of merit.  Especially for organizations.

So I was very impressed when, during the Q&A session following his talk at the recent MassDOT “Moving Together” conference, newly appointed Secretary of Transportation, Richard Davey, boldly said that he wanted to move beyond general statements that MassDOT would “increase” or “promote” or “encourage” to explicit performance goals that his organization should aim for.  Setting specific performance targets is a powerful strategy – it focuses energy, prioritizes activity, and can prompt improved agency-wide collaboration.

It is also a courageous and risky move.  It can increase transparency and accountability – two things that most organizations do their best to avoid.  It forces you to be more honest and visible about your strengths and your weaknesses, your successes and your failures – there is less room to hide.  It creates a potentially more productive but a definitely more challenging managerial context – particularly because establishing the wrong types or targets can skew operations in extremely damaging ways.

Secretary Davey seemed not only willing to accept the challenge, but eager to raise the bar even further:  He then challenged the audience to help MassDOT define and set the goals it needs to reach.  If he is really serious about this, it is quite incredible – a huge statement about how far the state’s Department of Transportation has moved from the Big Dig era of incompetent arrogance since Governor Patrick was elected.

Of course, it’s easy to stand on the sidelines and give advice – including what follows, below.  But I’m sure that if Secretary Davey is open to it, the advocacy community would be very willing to partner with MassDOT to constructively help with the hard work needed to develop appropriate performance goals.

Continue Reading »

Grass roots movements are the soil from which advocacy eventually grows.  As I write this, it’s not clear if the current wave of “Occupy Wall Street” groups will continue expanding to new cities, or if the arrests in NYC, Boston, and elsewhere have capped its growth.

For all my admiration of the Occupy movement, for all my hope that it grows and spreads, I have no illusions that it will amount to much in the short term. The movement is appealingly non-specific, although energized by enormous creativity and personal sacrifice.  At the same time, I have no doubt that it is the most important progressive political event of the past several years; the first major opening in left-of-center political space since post-Obama election disappointment sucked the life out of the remnants of the civil rights, anti-war, environmental, women’s, youth culture, and other movements that energized his campaign. It may be incoherent and ephemeral, but it is a significant crack in the ground underneath the marauding right-wing forces.

A true mass movement is amorphous, surprising, and uncontrolled.  It combines the deeply personal with the largest global.  It is a festive outpouring of popular feeling and creativity, combining hundreds of distinct threads of belief and demands into a temporarily beautiful flag that an unanticipatedly broad swath of the population begins to wave.  It exemplifies the collective self-organization of mutual support that anarchists dream about.  But its strengths are its undoing.  I sincerely hope the current Occupy Wall Street movement continues to grow.  But at some point its lack of organization and focus, its existence at the fringe of most people’s daily lives no matter how supportive they may be, its inability to strategically formulate specific demands and negotiate acceptable compromises – not to mention the approaching winter – will cause it to lose steam.

No matter.  Now that the thick air of hopeless inertia has been dissipated, this upsurge will be followed by others.  As one of the early signs at Liberty Plaza in New York said, “The Beginning Is Near!”  The Occupy phenomena will energize other organizing efforts, such as the New Bottom Line coalition of unions, community groups, and progressive religious fighting the banking industry’s efforts to evict the homeowners they previously exploited.  Eventually, existing or new Advocacy groups will pick up the themes and translate them into well-defined goals, drawing on the participatory energy to give muscle to their own negotiations with decision-makers.  Politicians will shift their rhetoric and votes to accommodate the new constituency.  Artists will incorporate the look and feel of the movement into their work, and advertisers will use the images and words to attract customers.  What will be lost is the communal nature of the fun, the inclusiveness, the spontaneity, the individualized combination of personal and political, the open-ended promise of possible better futures.

These loses may be sad and their loss grieved, but they are inevitable.  Those of my generation who were fortunate enough to be involved with the movements of the 1960s and 1970s – civil rights (and the successor liberation) movements, anti-war (and the more complicated anti-imperialist) movements, the counter-culture (and more problematic sexual liberation) movements, the women’s and gay liberation movements, the anti-nuclear and deep ecology  movements – know that they transformed us both personally and politically.  For many of us, it was a permanent change that has shaped the course of our lives ever since.

But the dissipation of a movement’s personal transformative power is an inherent aspect of its growth, an unavoidable part of the process that moves dreams from hope to reality.  Movements, like waves, grow then subside as they hit the shore-line of the real world.  The nature of the post-upsurge reality – the degree to which it reflects the aspirations of the original movement – depends on the strength of that movement and the skill of the allied Advocates.  And their success depends on their ability to create sustainable organizations and win institutional reforms.

(This is Part I, discussing Movements and Movement Building.  Part II, to be posted in two weeks, will discuss Institutional Reform and Organizational Development.)

Continue Reading »

We’ve all heard the argument: narrowing traffic lanes or removing parking will hurt local businesses.  And we’ve all read the research headlines that show the opposite is true:  widening sidewalks, adding trees, including bike lanes, expanding transit facilities, and making public space more multi-modal, people friendly, and environmentally rich increases the number of customers and the amounts they are willing to pay.  (WalkBoston has a wonderful tri-fold pamphlet called “Walking Is Good Business” that contains a treasure of statistics and citations, some of which I’ve used in this post.)  But we need to go beyond these generic arguments to focus attention on the three specific situations where Complete Streets provides significant support for economic development, and be able to articulate what those benefits may be.  The three are:

• Suburban Business and Adjoining Residential Areas
• Urban Neighborhoods
• First Generation, Inner-ring Highways

However, taking advantage of these opportunities requires that we also understand that Complete Streets is not a stand-alone strategy of including some combination of design elements in our transportation plans.   Complete Streets works for three reasons:

• added multi-modal facilities for users with all types of abilities using universal design techniques,
• improved aesthetics for a more inviting user experience, changing the “look and feel” of a space to be more inviting to come to and then linger within, and
• lower traffic speeds, not only through increased numbers of walkers and cyclists but also through the use of traffic calming techniques.

From a traffic engineering perspective, Complete Streets is simply inconceivable without at least some amount of Traffic Calming using road diets (reducing lane numbers and widths), tighter corners, bumps, chicanes, bulb-outs, intersection tables, and other self-enforcing structural features.  The point is that speed kills no matter if you are walking, cycling, or driving.  A recent  analysis in the British Medical Journal of 20 years of accident frequency on London roads using traffic calming to restrict speeds to 20 mph found an overall “41.9% reduction in road casualties….the percentage reduction was greatest in younger children …[with]no evidence of casualty migration to areas adjacent…Casualties of car occupants fell by half.”

In addition, Complete Streets is as much a community engagement and design process as a road layout result.  And it only works when complemented by appropriate parking, land use, environmental, resident stabilization, and other policies.

Continue Reading »